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On Women (Paperback)
Susan Sontag; Introduction by Merve Emre; Edited by David Rieff
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R498
R392
Discovery Miles 3 920
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Bringing together Susan Sontag's most fearless and incisive
writing, On Women examines the oppression of women and the tools
necessary for liberation. 'Sontag is one of the most influential
critics of her generation' New York Review of Books First written
in the 1970s during the height of second-wave feminism, Sontag's
essays examine the 'biological division of labour', the double
standard for ageing and the struggle for real power, topics which
are strikingly relevant to our contemporary conversations. For any
Sontag fan, this collection of lost essays is a revelation into her
achievements as an essayist. 'One of America's greatest public
intellectuals' Observer 'Susan Sontag offers enough food for
thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' The Times
'At the time she died, she was America's best-known public
intellectual. To my mind, she was also the most exemplary' John
Gray, New Statesman WITH A PREFACE BY MERVE EMRE
'The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.' These
two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down
the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan
Sontag a literary sensation. Penguin Modern: fifty new books
celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern
Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its
contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from
Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and
George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring;
poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking
us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground
scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
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ARTEMISIA (Paperback, New edition)
Anna Banti; Translated by Shirley D'Ardia Caracciolo; Introduction by Susan Sontag
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R310
R252
Discovery Miles 2 520
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First published in 1953, Artemisia is a classic of 20th century
Italian literature. From its first publication in 1953, Artemisia,
a novel about Artemisia Gentileschi, an iconic 17th century
painter, by Anna Banti, a brilliant Italian art historian,
established itself as a feminist masterpiece. Like Penelope
Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower and Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of
Hadrian, Artemisia is a book about the process of artistic
creation. Much in Gentileschi's life marked her out as a victim -
rape at the age of 18, a forced marriage to a man she did not love
and, a powerful, patriarchal father, Orazio Gentileschi, who failed
to value her artistic genius. But Gentileschi did not accept the
status of victim, in the years between 1610 and 1650, she produced
over 50 paintings that have established her as one of the great
painters of all time. She gave up everything - "all tenderness, all
claim to feminine virtues" to dedicate herself solely to painting.
Sacrifices that Anna Banti, herself an artist, fully understands
and captures in this amazing novel.
Susan Sontag's On Photography is a seminal and groundbreaking work
on the subject. Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of
photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic
issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and
the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered
our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to
shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act
as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to
identify us. In these six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways
in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of
reality and authority in our lives. 'Sontag offers enough food for
thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites'The Times 'A
brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have
made in our way of looking at the world, and at
ourselves'Washington Post 'The most original and illuminating study
of the subject'New Yorker One of America's best-known and most
admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on
contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books
include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them
Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor,
At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and
Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by
Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays
Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels
The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin
Modern Classics.
A series of provocative discussions on everything from individual
authors to contemporary religious thinking, Against Interpretation
and Other Essays is the definitive collection of Susan Sontag's
best known and important works published in Penguin Modern
Classics. Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first
collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive
thinkers of our time. Sontag was among the first critics to write
about the intersection between 'high' and 'low' art forms, and to
give them equal value as valid topics, shown here in her
epoch-making pieces 'Notes on Camp' and 'Against Interpretation'.
Here too are impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil,
Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies,
psychoanalysis and contemporary religious thought. Originally
published in 1966, this collection has never gone out of print and
has been a major influence on generations of readers, and the field
of cultural criticism, ever since. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was
born in Manhattan and studied at the universities of Chicago,
Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels - The
Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America, which won
the 2000 US National Book Award for fiction - a collection of
stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness
as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated
into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem
Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince
of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German
Book Trade. If you enjoyed Against Interpretation and Other Essays,
you might like Sontag's On Photography, also available in Penguin
Modern Classics. 'A dazzling intellectual performance' Vogue
'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most
intellectual of appetites' The Times
A startling reappraisal of the intersection of information, news,
art, and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and
disaster. From Goya's Disasters of War to news footage and
photographs of the conflicts in Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia,
pictures have been charged with inspiring dissent, fostering
violence or instilling apathy in us, the viewers. Regarding the
Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and
meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of
sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.
This is a memoiristic book and a dual portrait, built around
intense friendships with two leading public intellectuals who
achieved celebrity status--Susan Sontag on a global scale, George
Steiner principally in Europe, though also for a time in the US.
For audiences at Woody Allen movies Sontag was the prime embodiment
of the term "intellectual," whose famous 1965 essay "Notes on Camp"
won her an enormous following. For viewers of French, German and
British television over decades Steiner was the primary interview
show talking head, igniting controversy on many fronts, while also
commanding a loyal audience for thirty years as a book critic at
The New Yorker. To know Sontag and Steiner, as this memoir
suggests, was often to feel overmatched and yet also bemused and
awe-struck. Both of them gave off an air of omniscience and
self-confidence, as if they had taken to heart the words of the
Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, who wrote, "I cannot become modest;
too many things burn in me." Maestros & Monsters is the work of
a well-known public intellectual who was close to Sontag and
Steiner over a half century, and who managed to bring them together
on several occasions--the only times they ever met. Those
encounters are among the most bizarre episodes in this narrative,
which also features extended encounters with such literary figures
as Arthur Koestler, Edward Said, Phillip Rieff, James Wood and
others.
With the publication of her first book of criticism, Against
Interpretation, in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the
forefront of an era of cultural and political transformation. "What
is important now," she wrote, "is to recover our senses . . . . In
place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." She would
remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp
sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her
experiences as a traveler to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam
War, the aesthetics of science-fiction and pornography, or a range
of modern thinkers from Simone Weil to E. M. Cioran. She opened
dazzling new perspectives on any subject she addressed, whether the
nature of photography or cultural attitudes toward illness. This
volume, edited by Sontag's son David Rieff, presents the full texts
of four essential books: Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical
Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978).
Also here as a special feature are six previously uncollected
essays including studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter
Francis Bacon and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the
emerging feminist movement. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent
nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our
nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently
in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library
of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date,
authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature
cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on
premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic
intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who
made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical
writings, he shattered disciplinary and stylistic conventions. This
collection, introduced by Susan Sontag, contains the most
representative and illuminating selection of his work over a
twenty-year period, and thus does full justice to the richness and
the multi-dimensional nature of his thought. Included in these
pages are aphorisms and townscapes, esoteric meditation and
reminiscences of childhood, and reflections on language,
psychology, aesthetics and politics.
In these memoirs, Braz Cubas, a wealthy nineteenth-century
Brazilian, examines (from beyond the grave) his rather
undistinguished life in 160 short chapters that are filled with
philosophical digressions and exuberant insights. A clear
forerunner of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges,
"Epitaph for a Small Winner," first published in 1880, is one of
the wittiest self-portraits in literary history as well as "one of
the masterpieces of Brazilian literature" (Salman Rushdie).
'In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I
could do to any person; I create myself.' Intimate, vulnerable and
unsparing, Reborn bears witness to the evolution of Susan Sontag.
With entries dating from 1947-1963, the first instalment from Susan
Sontag's diaries charts her ascension from early adolescence to her
early thirties. Unabashed, though thoroughly self-reflective,
Sontag's diaries reveal the inner workings of her mind, her
insecurities and her passions. This compelling account of the
evolution of America's greatest post-war intellectual allows us to
behold the moral and political awakening of the artist and critic.
'An exceptionally vivid, and often moving, account of a young
woman's painful journey towards acceptance of her own nature.'
Sunday Telegraph 'Moving on several levels . . . thrilling . . .
fascinating . . . often reads like a brilliant postmodern
bildungsroman' New York Magazine 'One can feel Sontag's mind
beginning to ripen and bloom, and the full force of the
intellectual originality that would be her hallmark emerging' The
Guardian
Twenty-five years after her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag returns to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in our culture today.
How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others (via television or newsprint) affect us? Are viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the depiction of cruelty? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.
In Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag once again changes the way we think about the uses and meanings of images in our world, and offers an important reflection about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time.
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Don McCullin (Hardcover)
Don McCullin; Text written by Harold Evans, Susan Sontag
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R2,399
R1,964
Discovery Miles 19 640
Save R435 (18%)
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First published in 1966, this celebrated book--Sontag's first collection of essays--quickly became a modern classic, and has had an enormous influence in America and abroad on thinking about the arts and contemporary culture. As well as the title essay and the famous "Notes on Camp," Against Interpretation includes original and provocative discussions of Sartre, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thinking. This edition features a new afterword by Sontag.
‘One of the most liberating books of our time' Newsweek When diagnosed with breast cancer Susan Sontag discovered the extent to which we have developed a mythology to cope with disease, which can often distort the truth about illness and isolate the patient. In Illness as Metaphor she strips away the myths and presents the true significance of disease as it has affected cultures throughout the centuries. AIDS and Its Metaphors extends her critique to examine the metaphors surrounding AIDS and to expose the truth, free of guilt, shame and fear. ‘Whatever Sontag writes is passionate … hers is the satirist’s pity for our ignorance and folly’ Jonathan Keates, Observer ‘An exemplary demonstration of the power of the intellect in the face of the lethal metaphors of fear’ Michael Ignatieff, New Republic
'Magnificent... Her famous seriousness pervades throughout...
What's striking is the astonishing scope, potential and possibility
Sontag saw in short fiction' Financial Times The complete collected
short stories of Susan Sontag, one of the most brilliant and
influential writers of the twentieth century Susan Sontag is most
often remembered as a brilliant essayist - inquisitive, analytical,
fearlessly outspoken. Yet all throughout her life, she also wrote
short stories: fictions which wrestled with those ideas and
preoccupations she couldn't address in essay form. These short
fictions are allegories, parables, autobiographical vignettes, each
capturing an authentic fragment of life, dramatizing Sontag's
private griefs and fears. Stories collects all of Sontag's short
fiction for the first time. This astonishingly versatile collection
showcases its peerless writer at the height of her powers. For any
Sontag fan, it is an unmissable testament to her creative
achievements. 'Sontag is one of the most influential critics of her
generation' New York Review of Books
'The most original and illuminating study of the subject.' The New
Yorker Photographs are everywhere. From high art to family albums
to legal evidence, they capture and document the world around us.
And whether we use them to expose, reveal or remember, they hold an
enduring power. In this essential and revelatory volume, Susan
Sontag confronts important questions surrounding the power dynamics
between photographer and subject, the blurred boundary between
lived events and recreated images, and the desires that lead us to
record our lives. 'Complex and contradictory... one of America's
greatest public intellectuals' Observer 'Susan Sontag offers enough
food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites.'
The Times 'A brilliant analysis of the profound changes
photographic images have had in our way of looking at the world,
and at ourselves, over the years.' Washington Post
'The only transformation that interests me is a total
transformation- however minute. I want the encounter with a person
or a work of art to change everything.' Brazen, brilliant and
deeply searing, Sontag's diaries wrestle with the profound -
exploring ideas and subjects as far-reaching as writing, war,
desire and consciousness. From the graphic destruction of war-torn
Vietnam to her tumultuous romantic affairs, in the second volume of
her diaries, Sontag is profoundly candid and insightful. This
instalment charts the years when Sontag wrote the majority of her
renowned essays, including the ground-breaking Against
Interpretation in 1966. Riveting and enlightening, As Consciousness
is Harnessed to Flesh illuminates the mind of one of the twentieth
century's most significant intellectuals. 'Her diary entries
combine her interests with bright, aphoristic turns of
phrase....These diaries are a reminder of the value of the work
that made her great, and also mysterious . . . ' The Economist 'It
is a rare pleasure to read, in her diary, discoveries being made in
real time. She applies her mind to itself with enthusiasm' The
Guardian 'In its fragmentation and incoherence and passion, its
combination of the erudite and the everyday, it is more true to
life, both intellectual and emotional, than the most artful novel
or careful biography. It may well be that Sontag's diaries, like
Virginia Woolf's (which she knew and admired) will come to be seen
as just as brilliant and important as anything she wrote.' The
Telegraph
Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism.
One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as “a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.” It begins with the famous “In Plato’s Cave”essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching “Brief Anthology of Quotations.”
This collection of essays contains some of the most important
pieces of criticism of the twentieth century, including the
classics 'The Aesthetics of Silence', a brilliant account of
language, thought and consciousness, and 'Trip to Hanoi', written
during the Vietnam War. Here too is an excoriating account of
America's identity and future, a robust and surprising discussion
of pornography and other richly rewarding writings on art, film,
literature and politics.
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Death Kit (Paperback)
Susan Sontag
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R400
R325
Discovery Miles 3 250
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First published in 1967, Death Kit is a classic of modern fiction.
Blending realism and dream, Susan Sontag's second novel offers a
passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience.
The novel is a narrative of the suffering of Dalton 'Diddy' Harron,
told through his own observations. He works in advertising for a
microscope manufacturer, is thirty-three and divorced and a month
ago tried to commit suicide. The haphazard events of his life,
including killing a railway worker and falling in love with a blind
girl, are brought to us through the lens of Diddy's own mind. We
follow him through his journey to justify his actions and exorcise
his inner demons, but we can see what is happening to Diddy only
from inside his head, in the present, and the balance of his mind
does not always bear close scrutiny.
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